By John Warnock, Warrior Senior Fellow
A weapon has “military significance” when it can be used for “military” purposes. That means, in battles with the military forces of an enemy. Programs like the Nazi program to exterminate Jews do not have a military purpose, even if undertaken and performed by military forces. The intentional killing of civilians cannot be said to have a military purpose.
The Interim Committee had recommended to President Truman that the atomic bomb be dropped on “a war plant surrounded by worker’s homes.” That is, they had recommended a military use of the “strategic” kind. “Strategic” attacks had become common for the first time in World War II in Germany.
In the end, however, the Hiroshima bomb was targeted on a T-shaped bridge, the Aioi bridge, chosen by the Pentagon’s Targeting Committee because it should be easy for the bombardier to see and because it was in the center of the city. Colonel Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, was clear about the target: “The city was the target, period.”1
The “very big bang” the Hiroshima bomb made—it had the explosive force of about fifteen thousand tons of TNT—and the fires that followed destroyed not just any “war plant” and “worker’s homes” that might have been in the city but the city itself, a city of some 255,000 people. It killed instantly, by some estimates, 70,000 people. (In situations like this, it’s not easy to get an exact count, as you can imagine.) Some of the people killed were probably soldiers or might rightly have been considered war workers but most were not. Most were schoolchildren, old people, parents, patients in hospitals, health care workers, even some U.S. prisoners of war that we knew were being held in Hiroshima.
The bang the Nagasaki bomb made was a third larger than Hiroshima bomb’s. The aim point for the Nagasaki bomb was the Mitsubishi plant, an arms factory. The bomb missed the target but destroyed the factory anyway. It destroyed a distant torpedo plant. It destroyed most of Nagasaki.
This was not the first time we had attacked and destroyed cities in Japan rather than military targets. General Curtis LeMay’s air forces had been firebombing Japanese cities since March 1945. By the date of the surrender in August he had firebombed over sixty cities in Japan, destroying many more structures and killing many more of their inhabitants than the atomic bombs did. He and those in authority above him who continued to sanction his firebombing of Japan never stopped claiming a military purpose for it, but sometimes you can feel the strain. As when LeMay talked about seeing in pictures drill presses sticking up in the ashes of houses in the cities his forces had “burned up.”
If you take a look at a photograph of one of cities firebombed by General LeMay, you may forgiven for thinking you at looking at the aftermath in Hiroshima.
Firebombing, which we had started doing in Germany at the end of the war with them, crossed the line between military purposes and other kinds of purposes before the atomic bombs did. LeMay was not troubled by our having crossed the line, either in the firebombing or with the atomic bombs. What was most important, he said, was ending the war as quickly as possible. Whatever might end the war sooner was okay to do, even if hundreds of thousands of civilians were to be killed. Many Americans, then and now, inside and outside the military, have agreed with him.
That rationale would of course be available to any general in any country that possessed atomic bombs. Atomic bombs will end wars more quickly, no doubt about that.
What General Colin Powell and J. Robert Oppenheimer seem to have meant when they said atomic bombs were useless was that because their bang was so big they could not plausibly be used “strategically,” that is, on military targets only. Whatever significance the weapon had could not be a “military” significance.
It was, and because of its size could only be, what shortly after World War II came to be called “a weapon of mass destruction.”
If weapons of mass destruction are useless for military purposes, they are not useless for all purposes. They can still serve as weapons of terror. Terrorists do not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. Weapons that can’t make that distinction are terror weapons.
More specifically, what can weapons of mass destruction be used for? For genocide maybe? In 1948, “genocide” was defined by the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as certain “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such.”
The members of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission had recommended in 1949 against taking the initiative to develop the “Super” hydrogen bomb because, among other reasons “By its very nature it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide.”
But nuclear weapons may be useless even for this purpose.
When it comes to nuclear weapons, it may not be possible to restrict the killing to a single “national, ethnic, racial or religious group” any more than it is possible to restrict the killing to military forces. The weapons may not be selective enough even for that.
Okay, then. We can say finally, can’t we?, that even if for military purposes nuclear weapons are “shit,” as Oppenheimer said they would be, they might be useful as weapons of “omnicide.” “Omni” comes from the Latin omnis meaning “all, every, the whole, of every kind.” “Cide” comes from Latin –cida, “cutter, killer, slayer.”
Killing just everything. If done on a scale of which several countries are capable now, human extinction. Perhaps the extinction of life on earth. And quickly. In a couple of days.
No one today seems to think that the risk of nuclear weapons being used for purposes of omnicide is all that high. Weapons sufficient for this purpose exist, however, so the risk is not zero.
That they could be used for this purpose, no one should doubt.
